


There Overnight

by neverfaraway



Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: Bisexual Male Character, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:33:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27191119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neverfaraway/pseuds/neverfaraway
Summary: “This is it, isn’t it?” Fergus says sadly, ruining the mood. "The last Christmas. We’re going to lose the election."“Of course we are,” says Adam. “It’s going to be a complete fucking shit-show.”At the Home Office Christmas party, Adam makes a number of poor decisions. He tries his best not to feel bad about any of them.
Relationships: Adam Kenyon/Fergus Williams
Comments: 12
Kudos: 60





	There Overnight

**Author's Note:**

> Title from 'The Big Time' by Suede, because I imagine Adam got up to a lot of no good at parties while listening to Suede, in the early nineties.

The fifth Christmas they spend in government, Adam and Fergus find themselves invited to an enormous party hosted by the Home Office. It’s as though the Civil Service has finally breathed a sigh of relief, knowing the light at the end of five years of coalition is beginning to glimmer on the horizon, and thrown budget hitherto ring-fenced for stationery and flip charts into giving JB and Michael’s unholy union a premature send-off. 

It’s not as though Adam can fail to be aware of the impending catastrophe that’s hurtling towards them. It’s coming at them like a derailed train sliding down the sidings: its roof's hanging off, it's bulldozing Network Rail engineers left, right and centre, and he and Fergus are watching it approach, tied to the tracks, while Michael stands on the embankment twirling his comedy moustache. Barring terrorist catastrophe, war or disease - or JB going off the deep end and fucking a pig on live TV - there’ll be an entirely predictable dissolution of Parliament some time in early May. Between the end of the Christmas recess and JB firing the starting gun, every fucker with an eye on reelection will be knee-deep in village fetes and disinterested school children, pretending they’re spending time in their constituencies because of their deep and abiding commitment to the service of the British people, not because they’re all bricking it that the coalition, their great experiment in the politics of consensus, has signed their collective death warrant and destined them for the wilderness.

Fergus, in particular, has been made deeply miserable by the prospect of the election. There’s been a noisy pack of students at all of his constituency events, hurling around slogans about tuition fees and betrayal. Adam’s paid for a couple of polls, tried to spin the results in any way that doesn’t spell complete and utter electoral desolation, and resigned himself to the inevitable. Neither of them have admitted it; Fergus has a knack of turning green around the gills and excusing himself whenever anyone tries to bring up his plans for the future, and Adam thinks his cheek muscles might be locked in a permanent rictus grin from the time he spends making jolly comments about trusting the constituency to judge Fergus on his record on local issues. He sincerely hopes they don’t actually judge Fergus on his record on local issues, because he’s been a fart in a strong wind on that front, too. 

There’s a certain grim, suicidal glint in Fergus’ eyes, these days. Adam half expects him to commit one final, desperate act of hara-kiri and call JB out as a wobbling inferno of shit one Wednesday in the Commons; the other half of him expects Fergus to throw in the towel the minute Parliament's dissolved and slink back to spinning corporate bullshit about renewable energy with his tail between his legs. The fact they haven’t talked about it leaves him simultaneously weak with relief and vaguely sick in the pit of his stomach.

All of which goes some way to explaining why he makes the conscious decision to get absolutely shit-faced at the blow-out Civil Service Christmas party and do a line of coke in the toilets with some policy wonk from Work and Pensions. He’s staggering out of the gents, wiping his nose on the back of his hand, when Fergus appears, red in the face and apparently enraged. He grabs Adam by the arm and propels him along a corridor and into a tiny departmental kitchen, where a collection of identical Home Office mugs, jauntily arranged on a Christmas tree-shaped mug stand, seem to mock him while he tries to get his racing heartbeat under control. 

“Fergus! What the fuck -“

“While you’ve been snorting half the fucking GDP of Colombia, I’ve had Angela fucking Carter asking me about the fucking reshuffle.”

“Angela Cartwright,” says Adam. “Angela Carter’s the one who writes the - the fucking books about fairy stories. I think she’s dead.”

“Thank you very fucking much, _Book at Bedtime_ ,” Fergus snaps. Distantly Adam registers that he’s genuinely agitated, wearing his skin like it’s two sizes too small, like he does every time anyone brings up the prickly subject of his career trajectory. “I’ve had it up to my tits all day with JB’s fucking suicide pact with the anti-EU brigade, and now Angela _fucking_ Cartwright’s asking me whether I’ve heard any whispers about Michael giving us all a juggle, too. Why the fuck would I know anything about it? I’m only a minister of Her Majesty’s Government. Why would anyone bother to keep me informed?" 

“There’s not going to be reshuffle - Michael’s spent four and a half years sitting on his thumbs, he’s not exactly going to pull one of them out at this late stage and start smearing the shit around, is he?”

“Good,” says Fergus, on the verge of a familiar species of raging, wild-eyed hysteria. “Because if there _is_ a reshuffle, I’m fucked, aren’t I? We’re all fucked. And if Michael thinks I’m going to let him give me the shitty handshake and send me into fucking oblivion, he can find another sacrificial victim, because I am _this close_ to telling him to fuck off and taking myself off to a lay-by on the A-11. At least lorry drivers would have the decency to pay me for my trouble while they _fucked me_."

Maybe it’s the fin-de-siècle atmosphere and the fact the Civil Service is throwing them a pre-emptive wake; maybe it’s the fact that Fergus suddenly looks as if he’s about to burst into angry tears about Angela Cartwright and the prospect of a reshuffle. Maybe it’s that Adam’s coked up and feels invincible, the way he used to when he actually had the energy to go out on the pull. 

He’s got Fergus up against the communal fridge before he even thinks about it, one hand on his hip and the other in his hair, tugging him into a wet, filthy kiss. Fergus makes a noise like a startled peacock, sucks on Adam’s tongue for all of five glorious seconds, and then shoves him away with all the force his pass-me-the-custard-creams, middle-aged body can muster. Adam, who had been about to grind his erection into the soft heat of Fergus’ flabby underbelly, is breathing so hard he probably sounds like he’s trying to give birth.

“What the _fuck_ was that?” Fergus hisses, more furious than Adam can recall seeing him in a very long time.

“Well, if I have to give you the talk about the two daddy penguins who want to make an egg -”

“You - Jesus Christ, Adam!” Fergus is crimson, shading to puce, and he drags a trembling hand over his mouth like he can’t get the taste of Adam off it quickly enough. “This isn’t - you’re not -”

Adam squints at him, wondering if the coke had been cut with something, because he swears Fergus is bisecting in front of him, two wavering copies of him glowering at Adam with identical fury. “All evidence to the fucking contrary. Don’t be a twat about it -”

“Fuck off!” Fergus snarls, shoving his hands into his hair. “What the fuck was all the - all the - the ‘in it for the pussy’ bullshit? What has that been in aid of?”

“Did the concept of batting for both teams not reach the Home Counties at any point in the last forty years? Jesus, Fergus. It doesn’t have to be a big fucking deal.”

“Oh, no, of course, I’m sorry - you - my special advisor, my _best friend_ , just tried to _fuck me in a Home Office kitchen_ \- ”

“Oh, come on,” says Adam, rolling his eyes, because Fergus really is fucking pathetic sometimes. “Really?”

“Between Michael, who’s trying to sack me, and the entire British voting public, who want me fucking _dead_ , friends are fairly thin on the ground at the moment,” says Fergus. "So thanks for fucking it up, yeah?”

“Jesus, I’m sorry -“ 

"Can you just fuck off?” Fergus snaps. “Just fucking - go home and sober up. Try not to launch yourself at anyone between here and a taxi - I’ve got more than enough to deal with, without you facing a fucking tribunal. Don’t bother coming in tomorrow.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake - Ferg! Fergus!”

“Just - fuck off, Adam!”

“ _You_ fuck off,” shouts Adam, at the back of Fergus’ head, as the door swings shut behind him. “Very _liberal_ of you - very fucking progressive!”

The thing is, it isn't fair to accuse Fergus of being homophobic. They’ve known each other since Adam was a barely-paid, barely-graduated tea-and-errand boy at the _Sunday Mirror_ and Fergus was doing his MA in political communications. Fair enough, they'd fallen out of touch a bit in the middle, somewhere, and spent ten years only really seeing each other at the odd rugby match and other people’s weddings, but Fergus had called him out of the blue one night and said he was thinking of giving up the corporate hamster wheel and having a crack at Parliament and would Adam like to come along for the ride. The huge, yawning undertones of desperation on Fergus’ part, because he didn’t have the first clue what he was doing, and gratitude on Adam’s, because he’d spent three years chained to the night desk and was beginning to despair of ever doing anything for a living that wasn’t siphoning off the last remaining dregs of his soul, had gone unacknowledged. 

They’d subsequently spent every moment of a long, unforgiving election campaign living in each others’ pockets. Adam knows Fergus isn’t homophobic. Fergus is a hair’s breadth from being described in the press as a confirmed bachelor, aggressively appalling at speaking to women, and once sucked off a Labour grandee in the toilets of a not-entirely-exclusive private member’s club in Soho. But Adam’s high and really fucking turned on, and it feels satisfying to accuse Fergus of running away because he’s a small-minded bigot like Phil and his virgin compatriots. Otherwise, he’d have to consider that Fergus is running away because Adam just assaulted him at a Home Office party and, contrary to the conviction Adam has always kept lurking, unaddressed at the back of his mind - that Fergus is gay and a coward and probably half in love with him and there for the taking, if and when Adam decides it's worth the effort - it wasn't something Fergus had wanted at all.

He gets out of the building and into a taxi without incident, but doesn’t remember anything else about the process of getting himself home.

It isn’t Adam’s style to have regrets; or, at least, not to admit to having them. He’s made an entire fucking career out of it, from selling his soul to Dacre and his cronies, to hitching himself to the political equivalent of a half-hearted wank over a dirty picture he found in a hedge. When he wakes up the next morning, face down and mostly-clothed, his first thought is to check his phone; he reaches out a hand and shoves it close enough to his face to squint the time into focus, and then, with horrifying clarity, realises there’s a reason Fergus won’t have texted him the first of a series of catty, scathing commentaries on the misdemeanours of their colleagues during the previous night’s frivolities, because the misdemeanour had been his, and Fergus had warned him not to be in touch. 

His stomach lurches mutinously and he rolls off the bed and makes it to the ensuite just in time to heave into the toilet bowl. It’s almost a year since he last had to contend with a comedown and a hangover at the same time. He keeps it as a treat, these days; a present to himself every Christmas. Last year, Fergus, who has always been too anxious to do coke and so square he once thought he was dying after three puffs on a spliff passed round at a student party, had been there to scoop him up off the office sofa the next morning with a disgusting, greasy breakfast roll and a strong, milky coffee. 

He squints again at his phone, realises it’s the last Saturday before Christmas, and therefore Fergus’ warning not to come into work was entirely pointless. He’s got two missed calls from his mum and a text from Kishor at Party HQ. Torn, for a moment, between the urge to text Fergus something spiteful and petty, and drowning himself in the toilet bowl, he drags himself to his feet, peers at his own bloodshot eyes in the bathroom mirror, and washes his mouth out with a palmful of cold water. 

The flaw in the plan, as regards not having regrets, is that the fear now has him in its sweaty, anxious grip, and he’s thirty seconds from wondering what the fuck he’s going to do if Fergus is serious about the not coming into work thing, if he’s made a colossal error of judgment and Fergus is, somehow, straight and uninterested and hasn’t just been playing the long game, all this time, waiting until both their careers are fucked before making his inevitable, awkward, fumbling move. Before he can allow this mortifying thought to take hold, he stumbles back into the bedroom, props himself up against the headboard and rings his mum. 

“Hi,” he says redundantly, “it’s me.”

“Darling,” she says, sounding pleased to hear from him but distracted; he’ll have interrupted her in the middle of _Weekend Woman’s Hour_. “Did I get you up?”

“Nope,” he says, wishing he were still drunk. “No, just a late night. Christmas do at the HO. Everything alright?”

“Fine. Are you sure you’re alright, you sound appalling. You’re not coming down with something, are you?”

“I’m fine,” he says. “Hungover. What did you want?”

“I was just checking you’re still coming down on the 24th,” she says. 

Of all the tones she adopts in communication with Adam, the pre-emptive reprimand for ways in which he hasn’t yet disappointed her has aways been his least favourite. 

“Yeah, I told Katie last month.”

“Yes, but after what happened last year -“

“Mum, I’ll be there!”

“Good. That was all; I’ll let you get on.”

“Thanks,” he says, feeling vaguely guilty for raising his voice. “See you on Tuesday.”

“Bye, darling.”

He wonders whether anyone would actually miss him if he locked himself in the flat for the duration of Christmas and survived on Pringles and M&S vol-au-vents until the House resumes on the 7th of January. With a sigh, he checks the time again: just past 11 o’clock.

What he wants to do is roll over, get another three hours’ sleep, spend an hour sweating out last night’s excesses at the gym, and then lock himself back inside the flat with a bottle of vodka and the box set of _The Wire_. What he does is haul himself out of bed, spend five more minutes gasping and heaving over the toilet bowl, slump beneath a shower so hot it makes his head spin, and think about what he’s going to do about the mess that is Fergus’ latest policy briefing on social enterprise.

While he’s fishing around in the wardrobe for jeans and a shirt that doesn’t make him look like one of those tragic arseholes who tells people they’ve streamlined their lifestyle, when what they actually mean is they don’t have any friends (by this, he means Phil), his phone chirps. He grabs it without thinking, but it isn’t Fergus.

_Meant to say - let me know if you’re bringing someone. Katie’s doing individual filo parcels, so she’ll need numbers. Love, Mum._

It’s typical: to the point, affectionate, with an undercurrent of despair.

It makes him want to laugh at his own whey-faced reflection until he’s sick again. He’s never taken anyone down to his mum’s for Christmas. Instead, he’s spent the past ten years making stilted conversation with Katie’s boyfriend, then fiancé, now husband, Marcus, getting drunk on cherry brandy, letting snide comments about tabloid journalism and, for the last five years, the integrity of anyone who can throw themselves into bed with the Tories, wash over him in the name of peace and goodwill to all men. Last year, he'd woken up in his too-small bed in the attic on Christmas morning and stared at the ceiling in the small, empty hours before the twins woke up and raced downstairs to open presents. Then he'd caught the first train back to London on Boxing Day with apologetic platitudes about urgent parliamentary business and wishing he could stay that none of them - not even the twins, at age seven and a half - had bought for a second.

It isn’t that he’s an arsehole, though he’s prepared, at this stage in his life - forty-two and still doing lines at parties, like it’s 1997 and everyone still believes that things can only get better - to admit that it might also be the case. It’s more that it’s genuinely impossible to fathom where another person would fit into a life like this, which revolves, entirely, around the eternal pissing contest he and Fergus are engaged in with the very people they’re supposed to call colleagues. There simply isn’t space in that world for someone who isn’t a politico. It occurs to him that he'd heard this exact same argument from that sad wankstain John Duggan at some cross-party media op half a decade ago; remembering it makes him want to choke himself to death with his toothbrush.

His train ticket to Southampton is booked for Christmas Eve, which means he’s got three days of floating about in London to kill before then. On Monday, the department will be open and there’ll be last-minute revisions to the policy briefing to push through, providing Fergus hasn’t had his security pass revoked, but until then there’s… Well, what is there?

Usually, by now, he and Fergus would be on an early train from King’s Cross to Norwich, where they’d spend four hours listening to the usual volley of complaints about planning, housing and benefits, give unsatisfactory responses to all of them, and then retreat to the office to send strongly-worded emails and gripe about the petty-mindedness of the cunts on the local council. Thankfully, this weekend's surgery has been cancelled in honour of the Christmas holiday. Usually there’d be at least one other local event - an opening, a charity run, a fucking rubber duck race - and then Adam would get the train back to London and Fergus would depart for his parents’, or the pair of them would come back to London together and mutter a weary goodbye as Fergus shuffled out of the back of a taxi and stumbled half-asleep down the stairs to his basement flat. 

Sundays are Adam’s own personal hell; he fills them with the gym, a three-hour session with the broadsheets, and an evening in front of whatever sport he can find on TV, shutting out the rest of the world while he scribbles notes in the margins of drafts of speeches in increasingly myopia-inducing handwriting. Or he’s at Fergus’, prepping for one of said speeches, letting him cook for them both while they half-heartedly formulate schemes to get one over on Mannion, whom both of them have come to grudgingly admire, if only due to the fact that he still, inexplicably, hasn’t been sacked. Occasionally, on a Sunday afternoon, he goes to the cricket; sometimes, the rugby. Fergus doesn’t really like either, but thinks it’s important for him to be seen to take an interest in sport.

Fuck it. 

He grabs his phone and jabs at it until Fergus’ number scrolls across the screen. He listens to it ring out until Fergus’ perpetually grumpy voice tells him to leave a message.

“It’s me,” he says. "Listen, I’m coming round." He hopes it’s implied that Fergus had better bloody be there, because he’s not dragging his hangover over the river to him on a whim.

An uncomfortable Tube journey, during which the godforsaken pitching and lurching of the Northern Line nearly undoes all Adam’s hard work in reaching détente with the remaining contents of his stomach, and a short walk through the crime hotspot in which Fergus chose to buy a flat, and he’s lurking on Fergus’ doorstep, hoping he answers the sodding door. He rings the doorbell a second time, uses the letterbox as a knocker, and then fishes in his pocket for the spare key.

“Fergus?” he calls as he edges inside, wondering what the fuck he’s going to do if the arsehole really does have the temerity to be out. Sitting in the living room to wait for him to get back is surely crossing the line from workplace harassment to actual stalking, and he isn’t sure he wants to start the new year with a restraining order as well as looking for a new job. 

As he nears the kitchen he realises he can hear the faint murmur of Radio 4 and turns the corner to find Fergus staring at him, frozen at the kitchen table, looking trapped and alarmed in tartan pyjama bottoms and a t-shirt two sizes too big for him. Adam’s fairly sure it’s one of his. He looks horrific, nearly as pink-eyed as Adam, hair a sweaty disaster, and pallid in the way Fergus can only manage after an evening of drunkenness and belligerence the night before. He’d been mostly sober and morally outraged the last time Adam had seen him, which suggested he’d applied himself to the free bar with gusto, after Adam had left. 

“I’ve been calling you," he says.

“Haven’t looked at my phone,” says Fergus, despite the offending object lying face down on a pile of junk mail next to the fruit bowl. In all of Adam’s years of crawling back to Fergus’ flat in the early hours of the morning, he’s only ever known the fruit bowl to contain a single, elderly bunch of bananas. Presumably they aren’t still the same ones, but Fergus is so haphazard about doing his shopping that it wouldn’t surprise him.

“For fuck’s sake,” Adam says, shoving the phone across the table. Fergus picks it up and glares at the message alerts.

“Good of you to come and apologise,” Fergus says, sounding like he’s developing a head cold. “Be great if you could just fuck off again, thanks.”

Adam considers it for a moment.

The thing is, it’s not exactly like what happened last night came out of nowhere. If Fergus had been paying even the slightest bit of attention, he’d have known about Adam’s penchant in their youth for bestowing blowjobs on the undeserving at parties. He'd have noted the hours Adam used to spend when they were much younger and prettier, winding him up about Ken Clarke’s income tax cuts, until all their friends rolled their eyes and fucked off to a different pub. Once, while shitfaced in the back of a taxi after a party conference, Fergus had given Adam a somewhat garbled, blow-by-blow account of the time he sucked off the aforementioned Labour grandee in the loos at Quo Vadis, watching with smug satisfaction as Adam struggled to conceal his erection. Adam had had to shush him, bundle him out of the taxi, and flee to the safety of his hotel room to lean, gasping, against the adjoining door with his cock in his hand, wishing he didn’t give too much of a shit about Fergus’ career to kick down the door and demand a demonstration. 

It’s been six years of smirks across the DoSAC floor while Phil makes a tit of himself, and late nights in one another’s flats, sprawled haphazardly on sofas with takeaway cartons abandoned between them while they argue about the precise implications of fourth-sector renewal. There have been moments - admittedly few and far between - when Fergus has suffered a crisis of confidence and Adam has given him the pep talk behind the closed blinds in the office, about why they do this and getting through it together, his hands on Fergus’ shoulders and his voice low and persuasive in Fergus’ ear. It's a performance which, if anyone had a camera on them, would be as incriminating as if he'd marched across the floor of the House and planted one on Fergus’s pink, angry face in the middle of PMQs. Nothing has been a fucking secret; at least, not to him.

“Fuck off,” he says, with his hands on his hips. “You look like shit. Did Phil have you doing bodyshots off Mannion’s sweaty man-tits?

“Yeah, well, so do you,” Fergus says, screwing up his face in disgust. "I fucking hate it when you get coked up, you always make shit decisions."

Adam rolls his eyes at the ceiling. “Yeah, yeah. Of course. That was the fucking reason. Come on, then; no doubt you’ve been rehearsing a little lecture about why it was all so fucking revolting -"

“It was completely out of fucking order,” says Fergus, in his public-speaking voice, the one that tells Adam he was one hundred percent on the money about him having practiced it in the mirror. “No - fuck off, Adam - I mean it. You crossed a line, an inappropriate line, and you owe me a fucking apology.”

“Yeah, well, I’m here, alright? It’s not a big fucking deal -”

“Will you stop fucking saying that?” 

Fergus is suddenly on his feet, swaying in the direction of the Bristol sink that Adam advised him was a desirable feature, when he was moving to be closer to Westminster and had taken Adam with him to every single viewing, because he claimed that Adam, who had lived in the same nondescript, Docklands flat since he took the job at the Mail six years previously, knew more about these things than he did.

“Alright, alright - I get it - I’m sorry,” Adam says, suddenly concerned that he might actually have fucked things up. 

There's something unsettling about Fergus’ being unsettled, something that hints that this isn’t like the time in the taxi, or the time Adam had let his hand linger a little too long on the warm skin at the neck of Fergus’ t-shirt on his way past the back of the sofa, that night they’d stayed up til four in the morning to watch the by-election results come in, and Fergus had shot him a guarded, warning look, and he’d retrieved his errant fingers and gone to make another pot of coffee. 

Fergus snorts. “No, you’re fucking not.”

“No, I am - seriously, I didn’t mean to fuck anything up.”

“Why the fuck d’you do it, then? Why the fuck would you -“

“I wanted to,” Adam admits, wearily. “I wanted to, and I thought it was mutual, but apparently I’m a twat and I got it wrong, so can we just draw a line under it and - fucking forget the ‘don’t come in tomorrow’ bullshit?”

Fergus looks as though he’s on the verge of giving himself a hernia. He’s the colour of an imminent heart attack and he’s staring at Adam like every part of everything that’s gone wrong is all his fault.

“It’s fucking _mutual_ , you fucking _bastard_ ,” he says, and the fact he isn’t shouting is possibly more worrying than any other aspect of this fiasco. 

For a long, pregnant moment, Adam stares back.

Fergus is the same diminutive, mean-spirited drama queen he always has been, and Adam’s a forty-odd year-old misanthrope whose featureless bachelor pad feels like a prison every Sunday afternoon; somehow, Fergus remains the only person who makes Adam feel like he’s doing anything worthwhile with his life. On a good day, they feel untouchable; on a bad day, even Fergus’ sour-faced bitching reassures him that at least he isn't in it alone.

This time, when Adam kisses him, Fergus watches him prepare to do it: his eyes are wide and alarmed as Adam closes the distance between them, and he has plenty of time to put out a hand between them and stop it, if he wanted to, but he lets Adam crowd him up against that stupid fucking sink, lets Adam telegraph his intent with two careful hands at Fergus’ waist, lets him lean in and kiss the bitten curve of Fergus’ bottom lip. He makes a sad, desperate noise, with which Adam sympathises entirely, because this is something that wasn’t supposed to happen for at least another six months; not until Fergus was unburdened of his parliamentary privilege and Adam was on the hunt for a new job.

He can tell Fergus is about to panic, can feel it in the way Fergus is holding himself completely still, thrown off balance by a situation he can’t resolve by shouting at it. Adam kisses him slowly, licks his way into Fergus’ mouth, takes that bitten bottom lip between his teeth until Fergus is dissolving against him. He holds him steady through all of it while Fergus grabs the edge of the sink and appears to be clinging to it as a way of stopping himself from clinging to Adam instead. 

“Fucking hell,” he mutters, eventually, when Adam lets him go. Adam has to admit to knowing what he means, because he’s breathing heavily into the close air between them and he has to rest his sweaty forehead against Fergus’ so that he doesn’t have to look him directly in the eye.

“I can fuck off again,” he says hoarsely, because it feels like the sort of thing he ought to offer. If Fergus wants to put this back in the box and put off examining it until a time more convenient for both of them, he might well die of blue balls on the train down to Southampton, but at least he won’t be to blame for everything between them blowing up in their faces. “Seriously, if this isn’t -"

Fergus kisses him. He abandons his grip on the sink to slide one sweaty hand around the back of Adam’s neck and pull him down into a filthy, insistent muddle of lips and teeth and tongues and Adam doesn’t have much of a choice but to hang on to him, while Fergus makes a sterling attempt to climb inside him, mouth first. 

It’s been twenty fucking years: twenty years of knowing that Fergus is an infuriating pedant with an idiosyncratic grasp of the difference between simile and metaphor; of staying up late and snapping policy ideas at one another over greasy sweet and sour chicken and it feeling more like foreplay than anything Adam remembers engaging in with another human being in the sum total of the rest of his existence; of Fergus still somehow being his favourite person in any given room, on any given day, the only person he can sometimes stand to be around. 

“Six fucking months,” Fergus hisses at him furiously. “I had a fucking - a fucking _plan_ -"

“No you fucking didn’t,” Adam scoffs, sucking a bruise below his ear, while Fergus writhes against him, cock hard and insistent against Adam’s hip. 

He knows full well that whatever plan Fergus thinks he had, it would have amounted to some awkward shuffling in the aftermath of the election result, an embarrassing hug that went on too long to be anything other than what it was, and Fergus departing for a cushy job at a centrist think-tank, while Adam whored himself out to whichever political non-entity was willing to touch him with a barge-pole. They’d have made noises about the rugby, but Fergus had never liked it anyway, and Adam would have had to cancel too often to make it worthwhile, and they’d have seen each other across the floor at lobby events, and Adam would have had to excuse himself to go and have a sad wank into a tissue in a government toilet cubicle.

He gets a hand in Fergus’ stupid, ginger hair, shoves a knee between Fergus’ thighs and is rewarded by Fergus groaning into his open mouth, his tongue doing its best to explore the back of Adam’s teeth. His hands scrabble at Adam’s arse, dragging him closer, and for a moment Adam is inspired by a maddening image of shoving Fergus up onto the kitchen cabinets, wrapping the pyjama-clad legs around his waist and rutting against him until he's gasping and - for once - speechless.

He gets a hand down the pyjamas, Fergus goes gratifyingly cross-eyed, and then there’s a blessed lack of talking for the next five minutes, while Adam grips him tightly and nudges his own cock into the soft hollow of Fergus’ hip, panting raggedly against his temple. Fergus clutches at him, swears in his ear, and would have come all over himself embarrassingly quickly if Adam hadn’t taken a deep breath, extracted himself from Fergus’ determined embrace, and hissed, “Bed, _now_ ,” into Fergus’ gaping mouth.

He cajoles and bullies him up the stairs and into Fergus’ unmade bed, lets Fergus come to his senses long enough to peel both of them out of their clothes, the pyjamas flung haphazardly onto the floor over Adam’s bare shoulder, and intends to get right back to business. He’s halted by Fergus’ hands taking him firmly by the hips, and Fergus’ head moving determinedly in the direction of his cock, and then he’s treated to a blowjob so enthusiastic he barely has time to gasp out a warning for courtesy’s sake before Fergus is shuffling backwards, presumably planning to finish him off with his hand, the coward, and ends up catching Adam’s orgasm full in the face. It paints stripes across his surprised expression. 

“Fuck,” Adam says with feeling, gaping at him, more turned on than he wants to be, for a man who just metaphorically came his brains out. 

“You - fucking - fucking _hell_ , Adam!”

Fergus’ face is red and blotchy and covered in jizz and it really isn’t Adam’s fault he finds it so unfairly sexy. “You did that on purpose! Is this some sort of fetish thing? You can’t fucking finish unless it’s on someone’s face? It’s fucking - fucking _polite_ to ask first!”

“Yeah, because I’m known for my manners.” Adam reaches down the side of the bed and chucks a t-shirt at him. Fergus squints at it in disgust and then wipes his face. “Anyway,” Adam says, taking the t-shirt out of his hands, dropping it over the side of the bed again, leaning into the space between Fergus’ knees. He glances at Fergus’ resurgent erection, bobbing eagerly between them. “I don’t see you complaining.”

He kisses Fergus’ glistening top lip, swallows Fergus’ noise of disgusted protest, presses him down into the sheets and lets Fergus rub himself off against him, eyes screwed closed in rapture, choking insensate noises into Adam’s open mouth. 

When Fergus has stumbled into the bathroom to wash his face, flung a towel in Adam’s direction, and Adam has wiped the evidence of Fergus’ orgasm off his stomach, they flop onto the bed side by side. Adam is astonished by Fergus’ lack of self-consciousness, so much so that he finds himself embarrassedly wondering whether he ought to shimmy his way back into his underwear. The mad disregard for anything except getting their hands on one another has morphed, as it always does, into a languid, awkward sort of post-match interview, and it’s long enough since Adam did this that he finds himself thoroughly unnerved by it. It occurs to him, not for the first time, to wonder exactly how often Fergus has been availing himself of opportunities for casual sex, and whether he ought to check that Fergus hasn’t actually been stupid enough to download Grindr to his BlackBerry.

His own phone saves him from a comedown-induced spiral into anxiety by lighting up with a text alert. He reaches over the side of the bed to fish it from the pocket of his jeans. 

“Anything important?” Fergus asks, flopping onto his back beside him.

“Mum, on my case about Christmas,” he says, rolling his eyes. “Hassling me - not very fucking subtly - to bring a plus one.”

“Least your mum still asks about you taking someone; mine’s given up hope. No fucking chance, by the way."

Adam rolls his eyes. “As if you were invited. I’m going down on the 24th, so we can get the social enterprise thing out of the way first, send it off to Mannion with a cheery festive wave and a fuck-you-very-much for his trouble.”

Fergus frowns, propping himself up on one elbow. Adam’s still distracted by his apparent ease at lounging about naked, as though Fergus thinks a few training days with the Territorials and his and Adam’s vicious weekly squash game are enough to turn him into a sex object; he’s not wrong, apparently, because Adam’s fascinated by the possibility of getting his hands on all that pale, fishbelly flesh.

“This is it, isn’t it?” Fergus says sadly, ruining the mood. "The last Christmas. We’re going to lose the election.”

He says it as though the possibility has only just occurred to him. He sounds incongruously defeated. It’s the kind of sadness Adam’s been running away from lately and he hates himself for ducking his head to press a kiss to the curve of Fergus’ pale, freckled shoulder.

“Of course we are,” he says, matter-of-factly. “It’s going to be a complete fucking shit-show.”

There’s a treacherous voice in the back of Adam’s mind pointing out that after said shit-show, no one - or, at least, significantly fewer people - will give a shit what a former junior minister and his former special advisor choose to do with their genitalia in their own free time. It also points out that Fergus’ think-tank job will, at least, keep him in London, and Adam’s not bored enough yet of the stench of desperation and treachery that pervades Westminster to think about getting a job anywhere else. Voicing these hopeful possibilities to Fergus would probably be impolitic, given that he looks like someone has run over his dog. 

“You’ll be fine,” he says, earning himself a grateful almost-smile.

Fergus leans over and kisses him - exactly the kind of easy, familiar kiss they’ve been spiralling towards for the best part of six years - and seems so pleased with the novelty of Adam not punching him in the nose for his indiscretion that he does it a second time, pulling Adam towards him with one hand hot and sweaty on the side of Adam’s face. “Stay until Monday?” he asks, between kisses. “Everyone's on annual leave, no one’ll see us going in together.”

Adam considers pointing out that they’ve been turning up at DoSAC together on a fairly regular basis for the past five years, and that any assumptions have already been well-and-truly set in stone. He’s had half a wardrobe full of clothes in Fergus’ spare bedroom and a spare toothbrush in the bathroom cabinet for as long as either of them can remember, and he knows for a fact that Emma was aware she was only half joking every time she told one or both of them to come out, long before she made the permanent move over to Number 10. 

“Yeah, fine. Oh - meant to tell you,” he adds, while Fergus pads into the bathroom to turn on the shower. “Kishor at HQ says he knows why Angela’s got the wind up her about Michael; apparently she’s been sounding people out about shafting him after the election and he’s lumbered into action and shipped her off to the gulag.”

Fergus cackles unpleasantly. “Scotland?”

“Worse,” Adam says, coming into the bathroom to crowd him up against the cold tiles and press interested parts of himself up against Fergus’ flushed, blotchy skin. “Brussels.”

“Fucking perfect,” Fergus says, smug and vindictive and every bit the unrepentant bastard Adam gave up his soul-sucking tabloid career for. “How d’you feel about blowing me in the shower?”


End file.
